The dela Guerra family of California, I am told, is dying out in the male line and will soon leave no representative.

As to Richard Henry Dana, Jr.,[1] the author of the book, the reader may wish to know something.  He came back from his two years’ trip in 1836 ``in a state of intellectual famine, to books and study and intercourse with educated men.’’ He had left his class at Harvard at the end of the sophomore year (1833), on account of the trouble with his eyes and sailed about a year later.  When he returned, September, 1836, his class had graduated in the summer of 1835, but with a little study he passed the examinations for the then senior class, which he entered late in the autumn of 1836.  On graduation in 1837 he not only stood first, but ``had the highest marks that were given out in every branch of study.’’ He took the Bowdoin prize for English prose composition and the first Boylston prize in elocution.  He then entered the Law School and became instructor in elocution under Professor Edward T. Channing, and during this period wrote the ``Two Years Before the Mast.’’ In February, 1840, he went into the office of Charles G. Loring and in the following September opened his own office and began the active practice of law.  He was born August 1, 1815, at Cambridge, Mass., with a line of ancestors reaching back to the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, with several colonial governors in the maternal lines.  His great grandfather, Richard Dana, was one of the early patriots, a ``Son of Liberty,’’ who frequently presided at the meetings at Faneuil Hall at which Otis, Adams and others spoke.  This man’s son, my father’s grandfather, Francis Dana, was several times member of the State Colonial Legislature and of the Continental Congress.  He was one of the signers of the Articles of Confederation and married Elizabeth Ellery, the daughter of William Ellery, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.  Francis Dana had been sent abroad on a special mission to England in 1774 before the breaking out of the Revolutionary War, to sound English public opinion, for which he had unusual advantages.  He returned in the late spring of 1776 advising independence, and soon after this the Declaration of Independence was signed.  Francis Dana was also appointed on a special mission to Paris and Holland with John Adams, later was made Minister to Russia, and after the peace with Great Britain was made Chief Justice of Massachusetts.  Mr. Dana’s own father, Richard Henry Dana, Senior, was a poet and literary critic and a founder of the ``North American Review.’’ Young Richard was brought up in very moderate circumstances.  His grandfather, who had accumulated a good deal of property, lost the larger part of it through unfortunate investments in canals by a relation, in which he had himself become more deeply involved than he supposed.  I remember my father’s saying that his spending money for one whole term consisted of twenty-five cents, which he carried in his pocket in cases of emergencies.  He walked to and from Boston to save omnibus fares, had no carpet on his college room and had no chore-man to black his boots and fetch his water and fuel.  This, however, was the usual custom in his day with all but the rich collegian.  The necessities of life did not then demand so high a rate of ``living wage’’ as to-day.